Ask a man where he learned to have sex and he will point at a girlfriend, a movie, a website. Kirsten Trammell's answer is earlier and lonelier: behind a locked bathroom door, at speed, in secrecy, listening for footsteps in the hall. Fast. Silent. Finish. The nervous system is an excellent student and a terrible editor, and it files that entire sequence under this is what arousal is.

Kirsten is a psychotherapist, a tantric sex coach, and the host of The Naked Connection — a top-twenty sex show on Spotify with listeners in more than 140 countries. She went looking for the men's version of the bookshelf every woman in this field has read, found nothing there, and built it herself.

This week she joins Dr. Emma to talk about male arousal patterning and what it costs a man decades later, when he is forty-five, has revised nearly everything else about how he lives, and is still running a script he wrote at thirteen. They get into tantra as a working frame rather than a mystique, why the toys are not the center of it, how to introduce a desire without a different person simply appearing in the bedroom unannounced, and Kirsten's term for the skill she teaches instead of technique: erotic vigilance. Rather than asking a goal-driven man to abandon the goal, she moves it.

And late in the hour, almost by accident, the question that stayed with us. Many men are fluent in function and illiterate in pleasure. They can read one signal in their own bodies and have never been asked to read the rest. Which means a man may not believe he is the expert on his own body at all.

So who has he been consulting?

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